Religion Dispatches
…otic presidencies, into social control. Consider Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008) which offers in every chapter the same ritual set-up for optimism only to be debunked by low educational standards, video culture, and religious fundamentalism. “Scientists assumed that the expansion of knowledge about every aspect of the natural world would produce a less credulous American public,” she writes, “that assumption was wrong….
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…ciation of Manufacturers to the cause and creating brand new ones like the American Liberty League. But Americans dismissed their naked paeans to capitalism as just business looking out for its own self-interest. (Democratic leader Jim Farley famously joked that they ought to call the American Liberty League “the American Cellophane League” because it was a DuPont product that you could see right through.) Realizing that the direct approach hadn’t…
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…n. That said, there’s never any getting around the blunt reality of social class, and I believe Andersen deserves credit for showing how an ever-more-powerful overclass has shaped the political economy we all inhabit. If we’re lucky, we will move past the ever-more-sterile “debate” and get on with the business of uniting to overthrow an oppressive and highly racialized U.S. hypercapitalism. Because if we don’t—if we continue to spend energy in a p…
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…used throughout American history to describe White people. In reality, the American working class is racially diverse, and includes many BIPOC people. The 2021 American Community Survey shows: “Black, Hispanic, and other workers of color make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-Hispanic white workers comprise the remaining 55 percent.” But, as we shall see, the song doesn’t seem to be addressed to all working people, much less all those…
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…teness”—a “psychological wage,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called it that working class whites earn by construing their interests in racial rather than class terms, by attributing their economic insecurity to black people rather than to white elites and to the system they made. This same misdirected resentment—misperceiving black people as responsible for a set of socio-economic circumstances that were created by white elites (politicians, bankers, and c…
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…s, making Trumpism a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie not the white working class. Most of the real white working class, households earning less than $50,000, voted for Clinton. They voted for Biden this time around, too. As for Trump, he won voters making more than $100,000 a year, as he did last time. He is a populist, but it’s populism based largely on white supremacy, not economics. The pundit corps did not or would not see the difference. The…
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…c accommodation portion of non-discrimination laws regulate the conduct of businesses, and broadly insist that once a business opens its doors to the public, that business must provide whatever goods it offers without regard to the individual purchasing those goods. “Most businesses aren’t doing a deep inquiry [of their customers] in a manner that suggests that they’re thinking of their product, and the sale of their product, as endorsing those wh…
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…elation of sovereignty to power, citizens to the state, that characterizes American politics. Sovereignty, in American politics, is rooted in the people. Rather than resting in a monarch, American popular sovereignty is a matter of negotiation and compromise, a matter of relation. Not only does such popular sovereignty not look much like the old-school, European variety—which gets shorthanded as “tyranny” in our founding documents—it is also an id…
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…Chapel hill shooting, to GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, to a Sikh American beaten and called a “terrorist” in Chicago—now more than ever is a time to consider the religious extremism that exists in the American context, not just abroad. In the words of Mr. Roger, whose daughter Jill was only 24 years old when she died in the 9/11 attack, “I hope that the Memorial will have deep meaning, and will promote peace and welcome.” These days, whe…
Read More…help find the missing airliner by using the power of remote viewing, a form of ESP….
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